Article

Abstract

Ingrid Sahlin: Conceptual and functional aspects of prevention Prevention measures are in general regarded and presented as new, inherently good and rational ways of addressing social problems. In this article, these three features are discussed and rejected. Prevention is generally understood as counteracting a negative development in the future. In this sense, it presupposes an interactive relationship between the individual and the society, an idea that emerged with the Enlightenment and flourished in the hygienic movement in the beginning of the 20th century. However, some current preventive measures that target potential criminal behaviour and drug abuse aim at immediate control, and these methods can be tracked to even older means of protection and repression, such as exclusion and incapacitation. In the first half of the 20th century, the combination of grand future perspectives and immediate control of allegedly “asocial” individuals resulted in huge prevention programmes, materialised in the form of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and eugenic programmes in other countries. Prevention is, consequently, in itself neither new nor good but an historically well established way of providing legitimacy for controversial policies. During the last decades, different prevention models have competed with and succeeded each other. It is claimed, with references to examples from Sweden, that the choice between them cannot be explained by evidence of their success or failure in preventing social problems or crime. Rather, the state seems to promote the model that complies best with its current social and economic policy. Conversely, if a prevention model is at odds with general policies, it will be abandoned regardless of its efficiency. The conclusion is that prevention is neither new, good nor rational. However, when it is presented as such, it maintains its main latent function, namely to reflect and reproduce the current ideology of the state.